The passage: If we judged ourselves, we would not be judged by God; but when we are judged by him, it is his discipline upon us, meant to keep us from being condemned along with the world.
It is, I fear, a common feeling among laymen and clergymen alike, that ordinary words lose their plain meaning and become mere technical terms once applied to theology. “Judge” and “judgment” have a meaning everyone recognizes in ordinary life, even if they cannot define it precisely: a judgment is an act of discrimination, an attempt to separate the right from the wrong, the tenable from the untenable. Judgment as a faculty means a power that draws lines, that distinguishes acts, thoughts, or words which would otherwise be confused. But when we speak of Divine judgments, we seem not to carry this meaning higher, but to lose it almost entirely. A “judgment,” in that sense, seems to mean little more than a disaster we cannot otherwise explain, and so attribute to God. A fortune, a child, an escape from ruin, we call a mercy; a famine, a plague, an earthquake, we call a judgment. We explain the first kind of events by supposing God has gracious designs on us, and the second by supposing we have somehow offended him. In both cases we imagine some departure from his ordinary rule, some interference for us or against us, and we ask ourselves what act of ours it must be connected to.
St. Paul’s words in our text, which sum up the essence of many passages of Scripture, give us a way to test this way of speaking and thinking.
“If we would judge ourselves,” he says, “we should not be judged of the Lord.” We could not paraphrase “judge” in the first clause as “bring a calamity on ourselves” — so we must not do so in the second either. We are commanded to judge ourselves in the ordinary sense: to distinguish right from wrong, precious from vile, in ourselves. This, then, according to the Apostle, must be the main purpose of the judgment God exercises over us — as he affirms in the next verse. Even without that verse, this one is enough to remove many wrong impressions and to suggest many deep truths.
I. St. Paul assumes that we have a capacity to judge ourselves — that we can look over our own acts and feelings and pass sentence on them. Every man’s conscience, and the common language of mankind, confirms this. We know we are abandoning a right we have no business abandoning, one we cannot safely give up, when we fail to take account of what we do to others and what passes within us. It would be no mercy but a real degradation to be excused from this task.
St. Paul says next that the Lord will not excuse them from this task. He takes up the office they have abandoned, appearing as Judge precisely where they will not judge. Remember to whom he was writing: the Corinthian Christians were not men of dark, reprobate character — St. Paul says they “came behind in no gift,” and his letter bears this out. Yet that same letter is full of complaints and rebukes. Why? Because in their minds good and evil lay side by side, confounded rather than contrasted. Zeal mixed with party spirit; appreciation of spiritual gifts mixed with vanity over them; impatience with poor teaching alongside tolerance of real corruption; high spiritual aspiration mingled with gross sensuality — these marked them. None of this means they lacked what was best, or lacked love for it. It means that best and worst passed too easily into each other, with no landmarks between them. These were the men who did not judge themselves, and so were judged by the Lord.
Perhaps you will say that by “judging themselves” Paul means exercising church discipline, casting out unworthy members. No doubt the Corinthians failed at this — a man guilty of sins a heathen would be ashamed of was tolerated in their fellowship. Yet the Apostle never reproaches them for being reluctant to judge each other; instead he begs them not to be so eager at it: “Judge nothing before the time,” he says, “until the Lord comes, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the heart.” Judging others was in fact their besetting sin. They were forever deciding that this man was less wise or spiritual than themselves — slandering one as a narrow follower of Cephas, another as a mystic disciple of Apollos, a third as claiming a dangerous freedom under Paul’s name. And precisely because of this, they could not judge themselves; the faculty of judgment lost its edge, spent itself in unlawful, unprofitable efforts. Ever busy hunting for motes in others, they grew less and less aware of the beam in their own eye.
This is exactly why their neglect of outward discipline was so shameful. They had no real sense of the sacredness of the Communion binding them together as one body, so its profanation was easily tolerated. Party symbols and party loyalties were everything; their calling as baptized men, and the common rights that came with it, were nothing. This lack of discrimination about themselves did not mean too grand a notion of their privileges as Christians, or too eager a claim upon them — it was Paul himself who urged them to believe that all things were theirs, life or death, present or future, Paul or Apollos or Cephas, because they were Christ’s and Christ is God’s. They are blamed not for believing this too boldly, but for the confused habit of mind that left them ignorant both of their high position and their great danger — of the light they had been brought into, and the darkness threatening to put it out.
V. All this shows that the Divine judgment Paul speaks of could not simply be one that singles out this person from that — picking out the godless man while passing over the one living consistently with his calling. The old argument against Providence, that lightning strikes the temple and its worshipper as readily as the boldest scoffer, is not refuted here; it might even find fresh support. Human judgment had not made, and could not make, that separation; it had no commission for it. It had failed instead by not discovering the thoughts and intents of the heart it was set to guard, by not keeping that heart with all diligence. The judgment now needed, because this task had been neglected, would do what had been left undone: take men aside to question them about themselves, uncover their own hidden thoughts, awaken them to consider what God had made and redeemed them to be, what they might become if they truly walked in his way, and what they would become instead if they lived only in and for themselves, as though cut off from him.
- Now, brethren, I think there are principles here that apply to us. I do not think it right, as I said recently, to find fault with our own age or dwell on its inferiority to ages past. But if there are qualities generally agreed to characterize us, qualities we tend to value in ourselves, it is worth asking what dangers follow from possessing them. Most agree we live in a critical rather than a creative age. Whatever else we do or do not cultivate, the critical faculty develops in us from boyhood, and we give it every scope. Criticism, in one form or another, occupies nearly everyone who writes or speaks — politicians, artists, religious men alike are critics, some censors of predecessors as well as contemporaries. I do not complain that we were born into an age with this bias; it should not be violently resisted; there must be a meaning in it worth understanding. But it cannot be denied that the same effect that followed this temper’s rise in later Greece, the effect Paul found in Corinth, is just as plain among us: in judging others, we have largely lost the power of judging ourselves.
I am willing to use the Apostle’s language of our own case. I grant that Englishmen of this century “come behind in no gift” — that they have as many fine, noble impulses as men of any age; that we have shaken off follies our forefathers kept; that we see sins they were blind to; that our social standard is often higher; that we acknowledge obligations unthought of a century ago; that we can condemn evils from which we ourselves are not yet free.
But this too we feel, if we are honest: we may lack no good quality, yet we are gravely short of the energy and manliness to choose good and refuse evil. We let right and wrong impulses act on us together, as if both came from the same source and either might equally be obeyed. We live in a twilight of half-realized truths and half-followed convictions, catching glimpses of a heavenly light we do not trace to its source — so that we boast of it as our own, until it is darkened by shadows cast from the very mind it should have lit.
This, brethren, is the charge no special pleading for the age can evade. It accounts for the discontent and weariness earnest men show in it, despite its undeniable excellence; it explains complaints of its practical feebleness, even when it seems to have a strength that could move mountains. If this age were as paltry and heartless as it is sometimes made out, the sight of it would be more disgusting but far less saddening. It is hard to weep over a mere voluptuary; but that strength, bravery, gentleness — beautiful, graceful gifts, an eye to see and a will to command — should waste themselves in fruitless efforts and vain imaginations, sinking at last, having achieved nothing for the world, into nothing but pain for their possessor: that is a mournful sight indeed. Who has not witnessed it, again and again? What was wanting in these spirits finely touched to the finest issues? Can we find a better answer than Paul’s: they did not judge themselves. Amid the flood of impressions pouring in on them, they did not resolutely decide which to entertain and which to reject. They delighted in their own energies, sure these were not given for nothing, but were not careful to consider in what direction, to what end, and under whose guidance they should be used. They knew they held the highest aspirations, not earth-born as some told them; but how these aspirations came to be in them, and how they could exist alongside corruption and death, were questions often raised, never resolved. So when their habits carried them into free philosophical inquiry, they were quickly persuaded that religious people had degraded man, treating him as beast or devil when he has the capacity for everything godlike and true. But they did not ask boldly enough whether this misrepresentation came from a one-sided theory of the Gospel. They assumed the Gospel itself denies the glory of humanity — when in truth it proclaims that glory more loudly than any philosophy, and reconciles it with the very facts of experience that seem to deny it. They rejected the Apostle’s doctrine and those facts together, and have had to verify both in their own experience: finding there is a flesh in each man as well as a spirit, and that where there is no one to humble and exalt the spirit, the flesh will make him its slave.
With others, no less brave or noble, the experience takes a different shape. They turn not to speculation but to civil life, beginning with scorn for vulgar politicians and the loftiest resolve to do nothing that degrades their fellow men, everything that raises them. But they find coarse materials to work with; those they would serve do not understand them. They grow provoked and passionate, avenge their high thoughts of humanity in bitterness toward individuals, fall into despair, and at last are content to run along in the old rut they had urged everyone to leave.
Others have been formed in a different atmosphere from either, and have looked on both with deep pity or contempt. They have dwelt in quiet cloisters, among old religious associations and memories of other days, mourning their own time as degenerate and wretched, lacking all chivalry and saintliness. Their aim has been to cultivate these virtues in themselves and to escape as far as possible from the world they were cast into. They are ready for any sacrifice, fearless in following principles to their conclusions, willing to die to restore what they find decayed and almost dead. But the habits of the age show themselves powerfully even in these denouncers of it. Severe judges of others, they too have lost the power of judging themselves. Awe of the unseen mixes with superstitious bondage to the visible; reverence for sacraments that speak of Redemption and communion with an ascended Lord becomes instead the chain God meant those very sacraments to break. They long for universal fellowship, yet shut themselves into a narrower circle, inventing new and more exclusive watchwords — until, weary of such plain inconsistency, they flee to a system that lets them accept a mortal man’s decrees instead of exercising the personal judgment Paul asks of every Christian.
I have chosen my examples not from the weakest and worst of our time but from its strongest and best — those who might have been its truest champions — so that we might see our peril more clearly, and how it is bound up with that passion for criticism which, under the right conditions, God surely means us to cultivate. Now let us see what help we have toward recovering the power to judge our own acts and selves, which seems to have withered while we have been busy trying and condemning everyone but ourselves.
- “When we are judged we are chastened of the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.”
Much is said in pulpits about the blessed effects of God’s discipline. But is it true that discipline of itself produces blessed effects? Is it your experience that mere suffering softens and subdues a person’s character? Does it not often exasperate the worst in us, make us angry with God and with everyone? I am not speaking of the ill-disposed, but appealing to the best-disposed people — they would most readily say, “Suffering has brought out more evil in us than we knew was there.” But such people would add: “And thank God it did! Now we know ourselves, and him, a little better. It is this revealing of what is dark in us that drives us to his light. Because we have learned we can trust ourselves so little, we have learned we may trust him altogether. In us — that is, in our flesh — dwells no good thing.” So Paul’s words have proved true in us: “Not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me.”
What do such examples teach us? They give a striking hint of the purpose of God’s judgments. They are not mere punishments, though they may be that; not merely, or immediately, ways of preparing hard ground for seed, though that may be their ultimate result. Paul’s words explain their real object first of all. The voice out of the whirlwind, and the still small voice that follows it, are meant to awaken in us that slumbering faculty without which we are not truly human, because we do not truly bear God’s image. He comes among us so that our criticism may serve a more practical and more glorious purpose — that the power to say to one thought, “Go,” and it goes, and to another, “Come,” and it comes, may not be entirely lost to us — that we may not be passive slaves of whatever influence happens to reach us, that we may not, in the words of the text, “be condemned with the world.”
What does this mean — what condemnation does this judgment save us from? The world, considered apart from God, a society that frames its maxims and practice without reference to him, is condemned to a hopeless kind of darkness. Its members can see no light to guide their steps, for they acknowledge no light but what comes from themselves; they are always stumbling against each other, never doing each other justice, for the same reason. We are saved from this condemnation when God assures us he is with us, guiding us, caring for other men as much as for us, shining on them as on us — when we know he has revealed himself as reconciling men to himself in his Son, binding them together in his Sacrifice, guiding them by a Spirit who dwells in each and all. All God’s chastisements are meant to show us how little we have understood our relations to each other, what harsh judges we have been of our fellows, how tolerant we have been of the selfishness that keeps us apart from them. All God’s chastisements, then, are meant to purge the Church of its worldly elements — not by making it censorious and exclusive, for these are themselves worldly, but by making each man see in himself all the evil he has detected in his brother, and in his brother the image of the Lord he longs to see when night is past and day has dawned.
There are national chastisements, brethren, more terrible in the eyes of God and his saints than wars, famines, or plagues. When terrible crimes are committed in a land — even merely suspected, with evidence that makes them probable — and this awakens in those who hear or read of them no awe, only the excitement of novelty, the relief of something to break life’s monotony, perhaps even a kind of admiration for evil grown to gigantic scale — then surely that land should know God’s judgments are upon it. Each citizen should ask, “What is this judgment meant to do for me?” And Paul’s words still answer: it is meant to make you judge yourself, so that you are not condemned to the indifference so characteristic of a God-denying world. Such possibilities of evil lie in the nature I share! Such possibilities that moral and religious influence do not prevent from ripening into real enormities! God of our fathers, reveal to us the possibilities of good that lie hidden for us all in yourself! Reveal to us the redemption from evil you have worked for us in your beloved Son! Enable us to disown the curse that lies so near each of us, that we may claim the blessing you have made the inheritance of all! Grant that your judgments here may bring us to such right judgment of ourselves and of Christ, that when he appears as Judge of the living and the dead, we may say: This is our God; we have waited for him. He has come to save us from our darkness; he has come to take away the covering cast over the nations; he has come to fill the whole earth with his light.